A spate of murders on Mexico’s environmental frontiers

On the one-year anniversary of Julián
Carrillo’s assassination, we ask whether the Mexican government is sowing the
seeds for future conflict

On the evening
of 24th October 2018, Julián Carrillo made a run for the hills,
where he thought he’d have a better chance of getting phone signal. Some
heavily armed men had shown up in his village and were asking for him, he told
the authorities.

Julián had
every reason to be scared. Five members of his family had been killed in two
years - the latest victims in a long line of assassinations in his small
community in Mexico’s Chihuahua state.
Julián had already received numerous death threats, and seen his house set
ablaze.

Hours after he
made that call, his body was found riddled with bullets.

This is the
price you can pay for taking on big business in Mexico. In the same month as
his murder, Julián had spoken out at a local meeting against the installation
of a nearby mining project.

For decades,
his indigenous group has been standing up for their rights to the land that
they have lived on for generations. This land has been passed between logging
and mining companies without their consent, leaving considerable environmental
and social scars.

Fighting to
protect land and ecosystems against industrial encroachment has become more
dangerous in Mexico. At least 14 land and environmental defenders were killed there
in 2018 alone – the sixth highest death count globally, according to data published by Global Witness.

But Carrillo’s
death also fits a worrying global trend. As demand for products like timber,
palm oil and minerals continues to grow, companies, governments and criminal
gangs are routinely stealing land and trashing nature in pursuit of profit.

When the people
who live on these lands resist being turfed out of their homes, having their water
polluted or forests destroyed, they increasingly come up against companies’
private security, state forces, or contract killers.

New President, new hope?

Many Mexicans
had hoped that the violence on their country’s environmental frontiers would
take a turn for the better when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was elected President
in July last year.

During his election
campaign, Lopez Obrador pledged to make the environment "a pillar of
our social policy." Among his promises were planting 1 million
hectares of trees, protecting water resources, consulting indigenous
communities on development projects, and cracking down on the slaying of
environmental defenders.

Lopez Obrador’s
environmental credentials took a serious knock, however, when he began pushing through a series of
mega projects, including a US
$8 billion oil refinery in the state of Tabasco and a 900-mile railway along
the Yucatán Peninsula that’s set to bulldoze through some of the country’s most
pristine rainforest.

Both projects were reportedly launched before
environmental impact studies were completed, or local indigenous peoples properly
consulted.

The right to
protest in Mexico looks imperilled too. Just three months ago, in an apparent
pre-emptive strike for Tabasco’s new
oil refinery, the state legislative
passed a law to crack down on activism, including prison sentences of up to 20
years for blocking companies’ access to their operations.

It’s hard to
interpret these developments as anything other than championing the rights of big
business over citizens’ rights to their land and a healthy environment.

Justice for Julián

Today, on the
one-year anniversary of Julián
Carrillo’s death, human rights and environmental campaigners will be calling on
their government to find and punish his killers.

In the rare
cases where anyone is held to account for the murders of land and environmental
defenders, it tends to be the hitmen who are put behind bars rather than those who
hired them.

This is what
happened in Julián’s case - two men were arrested for his murder in January,
with no clarity as to where their orders came from. This of course raises
serious questions about whether powerful people in industry or politics might
be buying themselves impunity.

With justice so
elusive, it’s little wonder that crimes like these repeat themselves. According
to the local NGO Alianza Sierra Madre, at least 18 members of Julián’s
community in Coloradas de la Virgen have been assassinated since the 1980s, with
around half of those murders taking place since 2016.

These were
people who pitted themselves against loggers and miners because they hadn’t
been consulted about the use of their land, and these companies had refused to
heed environmental warnings.

By promoting huge
infrastructure projects that lack strong environmental safeguards and try to
bypass meaningful consultation with the people who’ll be affected by them, the
president and his administration risk sowing the seeds for future conflict
between industry and local populations.

It’s very hard
to see how this squares with Lopez Obrador’s electoral pledge to stop the slayings
of environmental defenders. If anything, it could open the door to more.